Rheila
Tl;dr - smol white-scaled viashino from Jund with lifeforce control powers - used to be a healer before an incident that took his healing abilities from him, and also triggered a mid-life crisis - now devotes most of his time to a mixture of community service for the needy and being a good mate to his decidedly male hubby - not the best at caring about people as people as opposed to either aid targets, assets, or collateral, but tries anyway Backstory Early life - born in Jund almost immediately after the Conflux, grew into a real frail child as opposed to other buff Jund viashino because of it. also got a mutant power innate magical ability to perceive and control life energy directly, so that's nice - would've been killed by the clan he lived with as a runt if not for his lifebending which manifested really soon, and also made him scary good at healing injuries and illnesses - was pressganged into medic training at an early age. this and knowing he was only alive because of his gift resulted in developing issues with self-worth and single-mindedness - at about 12 years or so, got brought along to a foraging trip, made to heal an injured guy from some other thrash, got punished for it, which was a strong argument towards just keeping his head down and fuck-you-got-mine'ing like the rest. he was, however, ultimately convinced by fellow teen Dajaman (who he'd known of but never really spoken with that extensively until then) not to give up on caring for people beyond just their thrash and that it was cool and good to help people even in a harsh environment like Jund, actually. they bonded over this unifying factor and soon developed a broader mutual appreciation and fondness, which led to a tight friendship and, some years later, a romantic relationship - fully rebelling against the thrash with a force of two people wasn't feasible, striking out on their own was drastically unsafe, and Rheila's healer role granted fewer liberties to put his ideals to practice than Dajaman's scout/forager role. due to this, he stuck to support roles during skirmishes with outside threats, tried to develop more ethically-sourced alternatives to the medications and techniques the thrash practiced, and surreptitiously used his magical prowess to entrust Dajaman with packets of pure lifeforce to distribute to the needy on his foraging trips - as opposed to the more empathetic and idealistic Dajaman, Rheila's take on the two's shared mission of making Jund better to live in was more practical and narrow, focused on the needs of specific people and more able to not care about the well-being of harmful people if need be. despite feeling that this was a more optimal course of action, Rheila still adored Dajaman's more uncompromising considerateness and felt insecure for falling short of it. this'll be important later - although mostly confined to the thrash's home caves, Rheila would learn foreign medical techniques from passing mages from other shards and develop an intense drive to keep learning more healing-related things to be the as good as possible at it - life went on somewhat steadily until Rheila and Dajaman's community service, hitherto begrudgingly tolerated, was perceived as an attempt to undermine the new thrash leaders' authority, resulting in exile (Rheila was about 25 at the time). from then on, the two wandered Alara for about a year, more free to practice direct action and more or less surviving off community support Sparking, breaking bad - then Dajaman went off to Grixis to investigate an incident, insisting on handling it through dialogue. Rheila felt him die there - the loss of the most important person in his life left Rheila somewhat dismayed and also triggered his spark, sending him to plane . once there, he assumed he'd been sent to some unseen part of Alara and frantically asked for directions back, only to be told he was in another world entirely - hoping that the entire husband-dying thing was just a misunderstanding, Rheila worked nonstop to figure out planeswalking so he could go back to Alara, failed, and eventually had to accept the harsh reality of things. this left him nearly catatonic - Rheila then almost automatically gravitated towards resuming his healer work in plane, learning quickly and finding some solace in being able to mend and save people again. it was also handy to bury all that grief into. initially, he pushed himself to uphold Dajaman's broader compassion in his day-to-day life, but as his responsibilities accumulated, his unprocessed grief and trauma festered, and the pressure of holding people's lives on his shoulders mounted, he finally caved and drained almost all the lifeforce from a somewhat disliked figure in the community to put it into a patient. having, in his mind, failed to live up to his and Dajaman's aspirations, Rheila pivoted hard into obsessive focus on saving his patients specifically and getting better at healing, other concerns be damned. the "fine if I can't do this perfectly then it's not worth it" of moral rigor, basically. this led him to eventually leave plane to absorb more mlg skillz and heal more people - from then on, his life somewhat loosely followed a pattern of "find new plane --> set up shop --> work, gather ingredients, experiment, absorb mad skillz; steal, hurt, and manipulate to achieve aforementioned pursuits --> develop anxiety about all the patients and mad skillz waiting in the Eternities that he could be getting in on but isn't --> speed-train sufficiently competent replacement if necessary --> planeswalk away --> repeat process, repress occasional guilt and doubt over current modus operandi - one of the planes involved was Vasille, where some corrupt healers were like "hey, you want the real mlg med school tricks? you should probably kidnap and do live experiments on these vagrants and orphans so they'll stop uglying up the neighbourhood, so you'll learn from that and we'll also hook you up". he did that for a bit but then was too disgusted with himself to ignore and only did live experiments with either criminals or people who attacked him or his patients from then on. also he rationalized this away as not wanting to draw too much ire so he could continue to believe he had totally sacrificed all the morals he felt he no longer deserved to have on the altar of being a good enough healer. Character Development! also this'll be important later - he also ran into Tshosiech, a planeswalker who's really into eating undeveloped sparks. due to saving-the-life-of-intended-meal reasons, Tshosiech decided to trap Rheila in a mental trap, but Rheila left before it went off Reunion, revised life plans - about six years passed until Rheila found out that Dajaman had been resurrected and was also a planeswalker. the resulting emotional shock made him wander through the planes aimlessly in a torpor until he found his way back to plane, where Tsosiech's mental trap triggered, resulting in Rheila being trapped in a coma state. he spent a month or two like that until he was busted out of it by none other than Dajaman, who'd caught wind of this. the ordeal made Rheila awaken green mana also - Dajaman coming back opened Rheila's heart and made him realize how callous and withered he'd allowed himself to become. in his shame, he tried to push Dajaman away, believing he no longer deserved Dajaman mate in his life and was no longer able to be what Dajaman wanted him to be. Dajaman, however, had already heard about some of the fuckshit Rheila had done (but not all of it. this'll be important later) and independently decided to forgive him of it (more details in his bio). when Dajaman asked if Rheila still wanted to continue the work they'd set out to do, Rheila realized that he did. and that was enough for Dajaman. - the two began living together again and, during and after some time of Rheila going back to some previously-visited planes to make amends, fully re-entered their old emotional intimacy and trust. Rheila would continue working with medicine and improving lives around him, but his perfectionist mind began to be divided between devotion to two ways of living: efficient problem-solving at the cost of compassion and a practice of broader thoughtfulness and compassion. although his will wavered, the faith and support of Dajaman kept him mostly grounded Further bullshit - then Shenanigans happened with a kid named Amber and Rheila got the parts of his metaphysical magic system that let him directly heal people irreparably damaged. whoops. this attack at what he internally associated with his entire existence as a person made him go a little completely bonkers and psychologically coerce Amber into reversing the Shenanigans. it didn't take. after angsting for a bit, he decided to realign his entire life's purpose into helping poor and defenceless people and mount a rescue of Amber, who'd been kidnapped while he was angsting. this got Dajaman to take him back after being briefly horrified by aforementioned bonkers-going, join the rescue, and also concentrate his previously-less-directed drive to be excellent in general into assisting Rheila with his new direct action project - this new lease on life went reasonably well for a while, if fraught with the aforementioned split devotion issues, until the duo returned to Vasille, where healers were being serial-killed by mutants created by all those live experiments Rheila participated in back in the day, which he'd managed to forget entirely. investigating this made Rheila un-forget this and, fearing this to be the thing that would push Dajaman away from him for good, began investigating further on his own. his emotional state would worsen to the point where he actively tried to give his life to the mutants to appease them, only to be saved by Dajaman who'd found out anyway. after an argument about trust, they resolved this and confronted the mutants' leader together. this ended up with Rheila killing the mutant leader and, through doing so, reaching a kind of emotional reconciliation between his two warring outlooks that let him let himself view things through the interaction of both. the power couple coerced their way into the mutants getting actual therapy and stayed in Vasille to fight against the various exploitations of the weak and poor there, with Rheila's new focus and broader mentality making him much more effective at it Driving goals - protect the unprotected, help the unhelped - try to be merciful about it when called for - have a cause to occupy his life with - ensure that Dajaman feels loved and supported Personality - mostly terse, distant, to-the-point, and actively projecting stoicism and competence in interpersonal conduct with non-Dajaman people - when he feels like he can mentally relax (which is rare) regrets being rude and actually enjoys discussion (but don't expect a wide range of topics) - has to constantly be doing something with his time, spends much of spare time making medicine or tidying - single-minded, focuses on one issue at a time - bad with words, more comfortable expressing self through actions - neat freak - holds self to a strict standard, has a deep vein of anxiety over not being some nebulous Good Enough because of it - takes self very seriously, gets flustered very easily if mocked or put in embarrassing situations - dampened empathy, not very emotionally intelligent in general Appearance - newt-like face as opposed to ordinary crocodilian Jund viashino - twink - white scales speckled with black ones Abilities - control of lifeforce (innate) - more directly: draining it from others and infusing others with it - more subtly: manipulating the link between lifeforce and mana and converting one into the other (think Channel) or shutting off the ability to access mana; controlling the flow of lifeforce through the body to disable certain body parts; tracking people by specific lifeforce "flavour" - blood- and flesh-related magic (learned, reasonably strong) - barrier magic (learned, passable) - grab-bag of other WBG-range tricks (learned, weakest) Weaknesses - physically fragile - constantly tense - probably hasn't slept properly in days. easy to catch off guard - gets caught up in details, has to actively try to see the bigger picture over immediate concerns Relationships - Dajaman: beloved mate. constantly worried about pleasing him. adores his compassion but wishes he weren't so gullible. convinced he needs to be protected from having to do unsavoury things - Fulmen and Arina: acquaintances. slightly cold to arina for prior pub racism Category:Planeswalkers Category:FluffyDeathbringer